These Bengals Are The Best In Franchise History

Andy Dalton of the Cincinnati Bengals looks to pass during a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday in Pittsburgh.

Jared Wickerham / Getty Images

UPDATE (Nov. 6, 7:39 a.m.): The Bengals added six points to their Elo rating on Thursday night, defeating the Cleveland Browns 31-10. Cincinnati’s current Elo rating, 1672, is the best in franchise history. The article below was written before Thursday night’s game.

According to our NFL Elo ratings — FiveThirtyEight’s pet metric for determining an NFL team’s strength at any given moment1 — the best Cincinnati Bengals team ever was the 1981 edition, led by quarterback and league MVP Ken Anderson. Those Bengals notched a franchise-best Elo rating of 1666.4 after they beat the San Diego Chargers 27-7 in the AFC championship game on Jan. 10, 1982. But two weeks later, they lost the Super Bowl to the San Francisco 49ers, and while Cincinnati has had a handful of good moments since, things have never quite looked as bright for the franchise as they did that winter day 33 years ago.

At least not until tonight — potentially. Going into Thursday’s matchup with the Cleveland Browns, the Bengals have an Elo rating of 1666.3, a mere fraction of a point behind the high-water mark set by the 1981 team. Any win, no matter how small the margin, would make the 2015 Bengals the best team in franchise history.

That 1981 Bengals club shared an important characteristic with this year’s team: great passing. If we scale every team’s per-play expected points added (EPA)2 such that the league has an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 each season, we can measure how effective a team’s offense and defense was in the passing and running games. This season, Cincinnati’s aerial attack leads the league with a 134 grade.3 The 1981 team ranked second in the NFL with a score of 125. The only Bengals squad with a better passing offense than either 1981 or 2015 was the 1988 version, whose 136 grade was fueled by Boomer Esiason’s own MVP campaign.

Here are the best Bengals teams ever:

OFFENSE

DEFENSE

YEAR

MAX ELO

PASSING

RUSHING

PASSING

RUSHING

1981

1666.4

125

111

98

98

2015

1666.3

134

94

110

87

1976

1663.3

110

108

121

112

1982

1644.4

120

108

92

92

2005

1642.7

121

112

94

87

1974

1632.7

116

110

105

78

2013

1630.7

106

93

126

115

1989

1627.0

120

118

104

87

1988

1626.1

136

133

106

89

1973

1618.7

117

111

106

100

An elite passing offense is where the similarities between the 1981 and 2015 Bengals end, though. While the 1981 squad also employed a solid rushing attack4 and a balanced defense that was essentially league-average against the run and the pass, the 2015 Bengals defend the pass well but aren’t particularly good at running the ball or defending against the run. Among historical Bengals squads, that profile more closely matches the strengths and weaknesses of the 1975 team, which was also good at passing and stopping the pass but lousy in the running game on both sides of the ball. (The 1975 Bengals ultimately lost in the divisional round of the playoffs.)

But if we’re looking for historical teams truly comparable to this year’s Bengals, we’ll have to leave Cincinnati. We can measure how similar any two team’s strengths and weaknesses are by using the differences in their EPA grades from above.5

Here are the teams most similar to the 2015 Bengals:

OFFENSE

DEFENSE

RANK

YEAR

TEAM

PASSING

RUSHING

PASSING

RUSHING

DIFF²

—

2015

Cincinnati

134

94

110

87

—

1

1970

San Francisco

134

92

108

92

4.4

2

2005

Indianapolis

133

98

113

95

14.5

3

2014

Green Bay

130

108

109

97

42.5

4

2013

New Orleans

123

95

111

87

58.3

5

2003

Indianapolis

126

98

99

86

67.5

6

2011

Green Bay

135

97

95

83

72.6

7

1983

Miami

124

96

118

91

75.9

8

1984

Miami

139

115

106

76

77.5

9

1988

L.A. Rams

125

103

113

101

79.8

10

2006

New Orleans

125

100

99

87

80.6

11

2009

San Diego

128

84

98

95

80.6

12

2015

New England

131

119

108

93

80.9

13

2008

Indianapolis

122

85

109

94

81.5

14

2001

Oakland

122

86

106

79

82.0

15

1995

Green Bay

126

87

97

90

84.2

16

1991

Washington

137

106

123

96

87.4

17

2004

Indianapolis

134

107

96

95

87.6

18

1979

Dallas

123

97

99

93

94.0

19

2012

Atlanta

120

86

108

86

96.6

20

2009

Indianapolis

120

91

108

97

100.5

According to this method, the 2015 Bengals’ closest historical doppelgangers were the 1970 San Francisco 49ers, with John Brodie playing the role of Dalton alongside little rushing support and a defense that was much better at stopping the pass than the run. The next five teams on the list are perhaps more interesting, if only because they’re more recent; there are two Peyton Manning-era Colts squads, two Aaron Rodgers-helmed Packers teams and a Drew Brees-led Saints team. We’re only halfway through the season, but this list puts the Bengals among great offensive company. Yet, like the comparison with the 1975 Bengals, it also lumps them in with a bunch of teams that went to the playoffs with impressive records only to lose before reaching the Super Bowl.

Cincinnati has an 89 percent probability of beating the Browns tonight and claiming its mantle as the best Bengals squad ever. But their real work may be saved for the playoffs, in bucking the trend toward postseason disappointment for teams constructed out of similar parts.

Footnotes

For an explanation far more extensive than you probably need (or want), click here.

Estimating EPA for seasons before 2006 using a weighted random forest regression model trained on data from 2006-2015. The model attempts to predict what a team’s rushing and passing EPA (on offense and defense) would have been if such data were available, based on the team’s box-score statistics relative to the NFL average that season.

Meaning its EPA is 2.3 standard deviations better than that of the average passing offense.

An underrated feature that causes their estimated EPA to rise despite a middling yards-per-carry mark: rarely fumbling. No team fumbled less than Cincinnati in 1981, and most of its fumbles were committed by quarterbacks and receivers, not running backs.

Specifically, we can take the squared differences in their passing and rushing grades on each side of the ball and weight them by the relative importance of each category in determining a team’s overall quality during the Super Bowl era. In this case, the weights are 44 percent to passing offense, 12 percent to rushing offense, 31 percent to passing defense and 12 percent to rushing defense.